“Look, I can’t see.  He said. How do you know? I said — And then I asked, By which morphological or expressive calibration are you so assertive? — Who are you? He asked. — I don’t know. I said. When I look into your eyes I see a reflection of myself — and then He asked: Who cares? —Any suggestions?  I asked —  Never let the wheel stop.  but Mind the speed!  He said. —You’ll get dizzy,  I whispered. — One more thing,  if you spin too much you’re gonna  crash. And then I said, Why not? I do not hold back,  Here it is,  Abracadabra, Blá Blá, Ta –Ta!”  

Auto–Gibberish or “unintelligible self–portrait” or “nonsense auto-biography” is an archive of visual and material information, often fragmented by mundaneness, of the multiple connections, paradoxes, nuances and inner contradictions that inform Diogo’s creative process. Individual experiences of desire, sexuality, obsession and velocity are juxtaposed and contrasted to expose the cyclical paradigm of individuality (clocks, circles) and the connections between Fiction and Reality. 

Diogo’s work recalls the spirit and attitude origins of Dada, atmosphere of scenic art, a profound coherency as far as its conceptual origins and principles are concerned  but above all, it values the manual arts and craftsmanship. It  inquires doing and thinking without hierarchies and an exploration of magic is embedded in the working process, tied to the unsettling meaning of what constitutes reality. 

 “In my work there is always a logic of apparent contradiction because I’m not selective when it comes with absorbing information, everything comes in and everything seems magical because and regardless all the pain and pleasure it might cause me, we have no idea of the impairment of reality…the making in itself is a sort of weird magic trick that is entangled in the quotation of the quotidian and the working process, in my case it’s always very frenetic, energetic and out of a sort of restless invention, that’s where the magician comes about— in the making, and in the same way the subjects are driven by intuition and by aspects of change and chance, and because nothing makes sense, I mix everything up and focus my energy in the making”. 

Casualty, coincidences, chances and change are innate to Auto–Gibberish and to its relation to Identity as magical. Magic transcends notion of language and fixed narratives, which are arbitrary.  Being Language arbitrary is limiting and often imposed and conditioning. Language as an institutionalized entity, often assigned according to colonial ontologies and geographical paradigms, restricts communication to words; missing to include sensorial communication as an essential aspect of human nature. The disavowal of language is problematic to the narrative, to the words.  

The embracement of the sensorial, the chaotic unspoken communication and magic in Auto–Gibberish is a powerful statement against the arbitrary, bureaucratic and predetermined models of communication and representation. 

The presence of mirrors in the works expose the dichotomy of our subjectivities, of ourselves entangled to our images. When you’re discovering your reflection, mirror phase, from the moment you don’t know what a reflecting glass does. Mirror’s reflections reduce us to our representation, to a simple image. Mirrors evidence the relation between representation and reality, signified– signifier, subjectivity and objectivity. Hence, the work can only come from a self-representation approach, in Diogo´s work, either if it is the body, the image, the thought—The magician operates in a similar manner to the artist, where he needs to transcend his own person to become his own creator.  

Nothing is static, everything is ephemeral, meaning is contingent in an everlasting experimentation enriched by our curiosity and ambition, a product of our individual nature. 

 
Indeed, it is the atelier (artist studio) as both a material and imaginary site that these two rooms are resembling, theatrically, where artworks become decontextualized from their original meaning by means of selection, archiving, experimentation, and creative impulses. The tension between the process and the finalized product transcends formal arbitrary lines and offers room for transformation, disturbance, and dissonance. Dichotomic relations of violence and peace, stability and fragmentation, linearity and circularity are inherently embedded in the creation of the pieces. 

There are no finished works. The constant creative experimentation and the ephemerality of the artworks are tied to the malleable, nonlinear, and ever-evolving nature of the artist’s experience. 

 – Marina Cortés Calle